Two memes today. First, Le Brunch.
1) Have you ever ridden a horse?
Once, when I was very small.
2) What is your favorite horse story or movie?
I don't recall any well enough to make a determination like that.
3) If you had the means, would you own a horse?
Probably not. They're pretty, but I don't like the idea of breaking an animal's spirit, which is what you have to do to a horse if you don't want it to kill you.
4) Do you think it would be neat if we went back to everyone traveling by horse and buggy or just an inconvenience?
Well, considering that the average commute is something like 30-45 minutes each way by car, and that a horse's maximum speed can't be more than 20 or 30 miles an hour, I'd have to go with "inconvenience." I can't see my poor brother getting up at 3 in the morning to ride to work in a buggy. Also, the parking situation would be murder. Not only that, were every vehicle in America to be replaced with horse-drawn carriages, dealing with vehicle emissions would present enormous [and extremely smelly] difficulties.
5) Have you ever ridden in a hansom cab?
Not to my recollection. I have ridden in an Amish buggy, though.
***
Now, les Witches.
Do you believe dreams are ever symbolic?
I think they're nearly always symbolic--perhaps not always symbolic of something important, though.
How do you interpret dreams? Do you feel some are scenes from past lives? Future premonitons? Hidden thoughts and feelings?
I suspect most are a combination of two or more of the above. I generally interpret dreams by using the "alien from another planet" method I learned in an excellent dream interpretation book I have: I pick a major symbol from the dream. Let's say I dreamed about being in school, about 3 weeks into the semester, and realising that I haven't attended any of my classes. I pick, say, the school, and pretend I'm explaining to somebody from another planet--who has never seen a school--what one is. This is a good way for determining what my major unconscious associations with school are. In struggling to explain it, the mind will reach for its own personal definitions first. The things your mind most closely associates with school will be the most likely "synonyms" for which your mind is substituting the symbol of the school. So, for me, it would be a place where you learn, a place where normal people learn at a normal pace but intelligent people are bored silly, a place where you learn to interact socially and sometimes get your feelings hurt in the necessary process of learning to deal with people, where you're given tasks that are largely busy work but are sometimes fun, and so on. Well, this to me sounds like an excellent metaphor for adult life. Many symbols are MUCH more ambiguous than this, though, and sometimes it takes a while before you figure out what your mind actually means. Most of the time your unconscious is telling you something you already know, so I don't often bother to interpret dreams unless they feel particularly meaningful. I don't put any stock in "dream dictionaries" because each person's unconscious speaks to them in a different way, and the same symbol may mean different things to different people. No two people's psychological lexicons will be the same, which is why it's important to find what the symbols mean to YOU, not to some dipshit writing a book.
What do you feel was your most symbolic/meaningful dream?
I've had a couple really important ones. If you don't count the ones I have while on Benadryl [which is supposed to help you sleep, but which tends to give me extremely realistic and gory nightmares that make the Hellraiser trilogy look like the Wiggles], the most vivid and meaningful ones I've had were the one where I saw a lady who I believe was my grandmother, and may actually have been her spirit [I later saw a picture of her that I'd never seen, and it was the lady from the dream]; and the one in which I died, traveled across North America as a spirit, returned home to show my mother the journal of my travels, and upon being asked if I was going to continue travelling, insisted that I wanted to live again instead. The first one was a wake-up call to really get serious about figuring out exactly what was the family history of female problems and exactly how to treat my own; and the second was an epiphany about the decision not to commit suicide as long as I was still young and had a fighting chance at a reasonably happy life. [When I'm 80+ years old, in constant pain with arthritically crippled joints, and fully certain that my condition will not improve, I will exercise my right to reconsider that position. I have never been in favour of quantity of life over quality.]
And that's the memes.
same bitch time, same bitch channel...
Posted by Frida Peeple at October 3, 2004 03:17 PM